1. The Summa Contra Gentiles and Its Context
The Summa Contra Gentiles and Its Context
IT IS POSSIBLE to make some sense of texts without knowing much about their authors. It is also possible to benefit from reading them without knowing when and why they were written. Yet properly to appreciate what texts have to offer requires that one does know something about their authors, when they wrote, and their intentions in writing. In this chapter, therefore, I turn to the Summa Contra Gentiles (SCG) by first offering a short account of the life and works of Aquinas. I then briefly characterize his thinking in general while going on to discuss when the SCG was written and why Aquinas embarked on it.